I think the key for me is that, at least under the original Presidential Surveillance Program, the providers that participated were not compelled to share their user's metadata. They shared it willingly, regularly, and in bulk. There is reference to a service provider backing out of this agreement a few years later, telling the NSA they would feel more comfortable sharing the data if it were compelled.
It's not clear if this has changed since 2013. But assuming Mozilla, or Mullvad, isn't compelled to share _all of their data_ it seems unlikely that they would willingly give that up to a government surveillance program.
I think ISPs have demonstrated they aren't trustworthy. For most people in the U.S., it seems, finding someone more trustworthy than their ISP is literally anyone who isn't admitting that they collect and share their private data. I would be surprised if Mozilla doesn't clear this bar.
This is the explicit danger of VPN providers. Even if the provider is not complicit (which I believe applies to the likes of Mozilla), it still creates a centralized aggregation site for collection.
I'm not even sure a US-based VPN provider is safe. GCHQ just conducts the interception and would share the data with NSA. At that point, you are at the mercy of the NSAs locators being good enough to flag your tunneled traffic as "reasonably a US person" so it gets excluded.
Oh, I am sure that it is not safe, thanks to the PATRIOT Act. Even if they were not storing any metadata, VPN providers can be compelled to 1) share all data about their subscribers, which will include you, then 2) silently wiretap and decrypt everything. US courts will rubber-stamp, as they've consistently done in the past, and "that's all, folks".
Sadly it's not like you'll be much safer elsewhere: as soon as you step outside of the US, one of the strongest cybersec agencies on the planet (NSA) will have free reign on your traffic. But you can resist the legal attack (in some countries) and at least try to make it challenging on a technical level.
I hope Mozilla want to bring some innovation to the table that will make VPNs somehow more resistant to legal attack (not just in the US) but I doubt it.
From write-ups of the 2013 leaks, we saw references to violations of the legal theory used to justify the Presidential Surveillance Program. One of those violations was them unintentionally collecting the wrong data, due to how the ISP was bundling packets or something like that, which constituted a warrantless search, and they supposedly took that very seriously because it jeopardized the whole program.
My take on the surveillance program is that they try very hard to be law abiding, even if they have to stretch what the law means to justify the program. If you are worried they have a warrant for your communication, a VPN isn't going to help you. If they don't have a warrant, they will avoid U.S. citizen's content like the plague for fear of compromising the whole program.
Thus we only have to establish that the VPN provider is at least as trustworthy as my ISP. That's a pretty low bar to clear in many places. I have no doubt some VPNs are operated by nefarious actors (no better way to collect high quality data), but I don't think that's a concern with Mozilla.
Write-ups of the 2013 leaks revealed they did not compel ISPs to correlate traffic to subscriber information. It doesn't seem like they had any subscriber information in their database, only enough metadata about the communications to later compel a ISP to provide the subscriber information _postmortem_ (i.e. who did this cellphone number belong to on this date?).
ISPs weren't even compelled to share that metadata. It was a voluntary program. Some ISPs said no. Others said yes and then later backed out. In the end something like 80% of the traffic the NSA was after was able to be collected through the ISPs that voluntarily shared their data.
But, again, this was 2013. 2013 was forever ago, things may have changed.
Yes, now the NSA have a single point where data can be collected that would be much more interesting than at your ISP.
Even if you don't have a static IP, I suspect the entropy of your /24 (IPv4) is also a lot smaller when over VPN.
Websites such as http://panopticlick.eff.org/ showcase how fingerprinting works. They tell you how many bits of information they can extract from various datapoints they get out of you when visiting their site, such as User-Agent.
Panopticlick does not use your IP address as a datapoint, but actual trackers most likely do. If not your IP directly, then a prefix thereof (such as your /24), to account for ISPs w/ dynamic IP allocation.
If you have a static IP, there's a lot of bits of entropy in it, i.e. it's great for fingerprinting. It's basically sufficient, by itself, to uniquely identify your home. The handful of devices in your home can then likely be distinguished by the User-Agent.
If you're part of your ISP's small dynamic IP pool (e.g. a /24), there's probably still a lot of entropy in there. How many people in your neighborhood are also on Linux and have the same set of fonts installed? Probably just you.
Your VPN's dynamic IP subnets, OTOH, can be a lot larger, and the members of the pool are not geographically close to one another, so there's probably a lot less fingerprinting entropy in your IP in that case.
Additionally, very few ISPs assign static IPs anymore, not unless you pay 5x the price for a business account. Trackers, by and large, don't really pay much attention to IP, since much more reliable metrics have been implemented. Sure, it probably is used to a small extent, but there are much more effective steps that can be taken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28computing%29?wprov=...
There are a lot of people that think anything less than 100% isn't worth your time, so they suggest TOR - but TOR has all sorts of annoying limitations that preclude daily usage. Absolute solutions are seldom worth the 10x extra effort they frequently require.
Another set of half-solutions can be seen here which will make you more secure...
https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/
ESNI, DoH, DNSSEC, and TLS1.3 are fairly easy to setup - and worth your time .
Using Firefox with uBlock Origin & PrivacyBadger plus the above gets me to a good enough place.
Illegal stuff on the other hand -> TOR.
The problem with doing illegal stuff with only half-protections is that the authorities don't need to use the metadata to prove your guilt. After they raid your house they'll have all the parallel construction they need to make it stick. ...then again if you're just buying personal use amounts of drugs - no one at the FBI cares.
Tunneling (even through TOR) isn't sufficient if you have someone well funded, highly skilled, and very motivated to watch you. I would posit that purely technical solutions will never solve human problems. Perfect, unbreakable, encryption can be trivially passed with a set of cleverly placed jumper cables.
The key, in my opinion, is trying to align technology with the laws that (mostly) already successfully protect us from jumper cable wielding adversaries.
From my understanding, The U.S. government interprets "metadata" as having no societal expectation of privacy and therefor they don't need a warrant to collect it. These questionable metadata collection programs seem like they can be effectively thwarted through half measures, like E2E encryption of the metadata (use HTTPS and DNS over HTTPS), obfuscation of the metadata through tunneling (use VPNs), etc.
Some metadata I don't have a good answer for, like location data when my cellphone pings the local towers. I can chose to share my location data w/ the tower so it can route calls to me, and submit to that possibly ending up in a government database, or I can keep my phone from talking to the cell tower being unable to send/receive calls. I don't see a half measure...
Unencryptable metadata (destination IP) makes it pretty worthless. Even on shared services like Cloudflare, things that are of interest for collection are probably paying enough that they get stuck on dedicated IPs. The 4chans of the world that might not be paying still make sense from a provider perspective to move to isolated IPs for DDoS mitigation.
Censoring proxies actually look at SNI to deconflict shared IPs where pornsite.com and travelblog.com are on the same Cloudflare IP, and will just revert to blocking the destination by default.
(I'm picking on Cloudflare here specifically because they are pushing it - but this applies to MaxCDN, Akamai, etc just as much)
Good. That's way better than being able to tell which site you were trying to go to. It's more expensive for the misbehaving network operators as well; block some popular sites just because they share an IP address with something you want to censor and people are bound to complain, even if they couldn't care less about the censored sites.
I was using Brave until this story came out and switched over to Vivaldi for the stuff that absolutely demands the Blink engine.
Point one, if they _repeatedly_ continue to do this kind of thing, what kind of stuff are they also getting away with? Or what's the next big surprise around the corner?
The second point is I really no prefer Vivaldi as things like sync work (it's been broken for a long time in Brave) and there's more exposed in the prefs for techie types who like to tinker with that kind of thing.
Firefox continues to be the every day browser and it keeps getting better as time goes on (another +1 for take my money for email, calendar, file storage, etc.).
This has the added benefit of being good for the whole network (your whole house) including gaming systems and smart TVs.
If you do use a VPN to mask your traffic, there are two questions to ask yourself:
1. who are you masking your traffic from?
2. can you trust the VPN network more?
In general, you cannot trust a VPN network more, and HTTPS is the solution as it provides end-to-end encryption with some important caveats (web PKI)
Running your own VPN is not a good solution either, because who owns the servers where your VPN is running?
The bulk metadata programs, as far as we know, only collect metadata. Which two IP addresses communicated, the routes they took, the size of the payloads, etc. are all "metadata".
HTTPS, AFAIK, does not solve this.
Metadata is obviously the least important data to analyze, but for example a VPN does not hide the size of payloads. TLS 1.3 do addresses that and let's you randomly pad messages but I don't think anybody use that.
I also trust many VPN providers more than my ISP, which actively engages in MITM like compressing images to be a lower resolution on HTTP pages on 4G networks.
I use Mullvad, paid using BTC that came straight from a tumbler. I don't use it for any nefarious reasons, just wanted to see how such a setup would work. It was surprisingly painless. I think it took 15 minutes in total from moving my btc to the tumbler and having the tumbler move the btc to my Mullvad account.
Am I 100% secure? No, they know what IP I'm connecting from. Is my name attached to the VPN? No, not even close. I suppose if I wanted to further improve my security I wouldn't use my own home network, but public wifi's nearby.
But again, I didn't do it to stay "safe" or anonymous. Just wanted to see how the process would actually be.
> But again, I didn't do it to stay "safe" or anonymous.
I sincerely hope that you're trying to stay safe if you're admitting to money laundering on a public forum.
Tumbling coins is just obscuring their origin.
The two don't inherently have anything to do with each other.
Even if you tumble "dirty" coins, you've got to explain to the IRS the source of income behind the new coins. Tumbling, in and of itself, doesn't achieve that.
It's not right, but that's the way the rules are written.
Someone should let FinCEN know that their definition is incorrect: https://www.fincen.gov/history-anti-money-laundering-laws
1. Tor is (rightly) used by anyone who has a good reason for remaining anonymous. (See [REALNAMES] for who this can be.) Anyone trying to smear Tor as only used by drug dealers and other unsavory types are themselves suspect of having an agenda of discouraging Tor use for anyone lest they be suspected. This can only lead to an installation of Tor being viewed as a suspicious thing in itself; who would want that?
2. His threat model of Mossad or not-Mossad leaves out one important actor, which we can call the NSA. They, and others like them, unlike Mossad, are not after you personally in that they don't want to do anything to you. Not immediately. Not now. They simply want to get to know you better. They are gathering information. All the information. What you do, what you buy, how you vote, what you think. And they want to do this to everybody, all the time. This might or not bite you in the future. He seems to imply that since nothing immediately bad is happening by using slightly bad security, then it’s OK and we shouldn’t worry about it, since Mossad is not after us. I think that we should have a slightly longer view of what allowing NSA (et al.) to know everything about everybody would mean, and who NSA could some day give this information to, and what those people could do with the information. You have to think a few steps ahead to realize the danger.
[REALNAMES] Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy? https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
A public VPN service is good for localized privacy. Even a cheap Ubiquity setup will be able to tell about your habits. It's probably good enough to avoid the attention of a civil or informal inquiry (DMCA, employer, etc).
It's not clear to me whether the methods trackers use to de-anonymize you are considered "content" or "metadata", and whether the U.S. government would need a warrant to access tracker information.
Do you have thoughts?
VPNs seems like a really obvious bypass of controls and surveillance capability. I’m sure the folks at NSA, et al thought of it too.
Just because they know its a way to thwart their system doesn't mean they have another "legal" way to collect the same data.
First, geo blocking often catches it or provider has moved to other means to verify address. I don't use Netflix but for certain streaming sites in Japan that I use and BBC express does nothing.
Second, it doesn't get pass GFW whereas shadowsocks based solution does.
Overall it seems the only benefits are getting better speed sometimes and theoretical privacy benefits.
Do you have thoughts?
ISPs can observe your DNS lookups to their servers and assemble a profile on you based on the domain names you look up, and put you into a series of audiences that marketers can then use (for a fee) for ad targeting.
ISPs can also observer your DNS lookups to Google’s or anyone else’s public DNS servers.
ISPs can snoop on your unencrypted traffic, proxy it, and inject headers into HTTP responses to facilitate (you guessed it) the creation and sale of audience data to advertisers.
ISPs can transcode (and downsample) multimedia content to decongest their pipes or airwaves.
If you are a spy or a member of a disfavored political group, you should almost appreciate the scummy practices of ISPs, as it drives a bunch of non-spies and people not associated with disfavored political groups to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies.
If I worked at the NSA or CIA or FSB or Mossad or wherever, I would highly encourage lawmakers to enact laws to protect consumer privacy in order to drastically reduce the perceived need for people not in the above groups (et alia) to adopt VPNs and other technologies; there would be fewer “boring” people using such technologies, giving the needles a lot less haystack to get lost in.
edw, could you elaborate on that, please? I thought changing to public DNS servers like OpenDNS provides some security from ISP tracking.
Test your own ISP: try something like
nslookup news.ycombinator.com 1.2.3.4
If you get a response, your ISP is gaslighting you.
(I suppose this is one of the problems that DNS-over-HTTPS is designed to fix.)
...
DNS-over-HTTPS can be enabled in Firefox via Network settings, turns out.
Protocols are not designed for what we use them for, and buggy legacy applications that won't change their protocols or implement them correctly. The more people use VPNs, the more the problem gets buried behind a wall of abstraction. The proliferation of VPNs is really the burying of a problem, not the solution.
I don't care about being tracked, because I live my life in the open. I'm not a vulnerable minority, so I don't fear for my safety. I don't care what a random corporation (or anyone, really) knows about me. You could log into every digital account I have, and the only thing I'd be worried about you finding is an active session to my bank's website if I was still logged in at the time. I don't care if my ISP "monetizes me".
I also know how to browse the web as securely as possible, and that there are plenty of ways I can be hacked regardless of my network connection. The biggest risk I face is not from a VPN, but from my local network: if my internet modem or router gets compromised (either remotely or through my machine), I'm subject to local attacks a VPN won't protect me from. And if the government wants to hack me, they'll just guess what websites I'm viewing (either by conventional means or statistical traffic analysis), hack the server, and drop a payload through a browser 0-day.
I could see using a VPN if I was an activist, or of a class of citizen that's oppressed by my society or government. But even then, they'd figure out I was using a VPN, and realize I'm hiding something. So you could argue everyone should be on a VPN to make this less noticeable.
But then we go back to the beginning: we're not solving the root problem.
I don't understand this argument, but would like to.
I run https://everytwoyears.org, a political non-profit focused on ending the warrantless metadata collection of U.S. citizens' communications. From everything I know about these programs, they are _explicitly_ not collecting content of communications. These programs only collect the metadata about a communication. As citizens, we don't get to have a clear definition of "metadata" (that is classified!) but we can assume anything that isn't the message itself is at risk of being considered metadata, especially if it was shared with a service provider in the normal course of conducting business (i.e. routing a request).
For HTTP requests, I assume the body of the request would require a warrant before it can be persisted on a government server. The HTTP headers, if unencrypted, _might_ be considered metadata but I would be surprised. The IPV4 headers are more than likely metadata. DNS queries are more than likely metadata.
If you are trying to avoid _active_ surveillance, where your government has a warrant, a VPN isn't going to help you. If you are trying to avoid _active_ surveillance where your adversary doesn't need/want a warrant to search you, a VPN isn't going to help you. But if you are trying to avoid having your internet activity ending up, de-anonymized, in a metadata database that your government does bulk analysis on, a VPN does seem like it would help. It seems like it would help a lot.